Dallas and Oak Cliff have decided to get together on plans for a streetcar. Previously, Oak Cliff and Fort Worth were going to go in together to seek TIGER stimulus funding for new streetcar projects. However Dallas has plans for a streetcar as well, so bringing the ideas together is smart, considering it will lower the overall costs of a system that would likely run just blocks away from the other if allowed to plan separately.
I'm going to take a wild guess and venture to say that they won't get funding for the project. Given the whole country is foaming at the mouth for only $1.5 billion dollars in funds, it would be hard to expect projects like these to get funding over those more established. The low funding with so much interest makes that extra $2 billion from cash for clunkers look silly as well, considering there are transit projects that could help guide new growth that reduces VMT versus paying for people's new cars so they can drive more.
2 comments:
To be fair, C4C wasn't meant as a transportation program but an environmental and economic one. Getting old, dirty cars off the street and providing jobs creating new cleaner cars was the purpose.
I'd venture to say that anyone who was trading in an old car for a new one will be driving about the same amount as before, not more.
The same amount of money applied to transit funding would not have produced enough tangible outcomes to be noticed or popular.
Let the old cars be replaced. It's not as radical helpful long term as redesigning the American city from the ground up to include transit, but it's better than a sharp stick in the eye.
I read that their goal is to have streetcars running on the Houston Street Viaduct by 2012.
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